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Monthly Archives: February 2013

Besides the new addition I have to my family, I am adding some new features to the show this week.

First I will start with headlines, a toungue in cheek look at some of the recent headlines of the week. Then I will announce this weeks winner of the “Tweet of the Week” award. The prize is just acknowledgement on the show and being showcased on the @liberaldanradio twitter page. But it is a fun segment that I look forward to doing from now on.

Then I welcome on previous guest Joanna Schroeder to discuss some of the happennings this week. From the Oscars to the passage of VAWA we will touch on those topics.

Later I will bring on Bryan from Coolminiornot to discuss another major anouncement from their company.

I will also be bringing up the Supreme Court and their look at the voting rights act.

A recent Supreme Court ruling reversed earlier precedent by saying that a dog need not be trained in the kind of drugs found in order to make the search of a vehicle after a reaction by the dog. Does this set a very dangerous precedent?

Who caused the sequester? Does it matter? How are Republicans being ridiculous about their claims of Obama not compromising?

Louisiana was found to be the most corrupt state in the union. Is this a surprise? What about the claims that Governor Jindal made about improving our system of ethics? Did they fail to reach their goals? Or where they doomed from the start.

In the age of the internet the State of the Union often has a lot of spoilers. The President releases notes about that speech. The rebuttal side releases notes about that speech. So for both speeches, you have people responding before a speech is even made. Hell, even I was able to “shoot first” and critique both speeches made on my blog. You can see my State Of The Union live blog here. Feel free to comment about what I said.

Now that it is after the fact, we can listen to the responses made by the GOP and see if what they are saying are valid responses to the President or if they are just more of the same.

One of the items brought up in the SOTU was the President’s drone strike policy that enables him to target American Citizens believed to be part of a terrorist network. I have a huge problem with this.

However, we have a similar attitude in the LAPD in the hunt for Dorner. It seems that they also had no problems shooting first and asking questions later in that manhunt as well.

Discuss all those topics and more, tonight on Liberal Dan Radio: Talk from the left, that’s right. 8pm Central on Blog Talk Radio.

On national defense, President Obama is expected to discuss reducing nuclear weapons and bringing troops home from Afghanistan. I am sure the tea party response, if not the main GOP response, will be critical of the reduction of nuclear weapons (even though we have more than enough to take out everyone else on Earth).

There is also a suggestion that President Obama will announce a free trade agreement with Europe. I am ok with “free trade” as long as it is “fair trade”. The American worker cannot compete with workers in other countries where labor laws are not equivalent.

Of course, excerpts of the official GOP response is also available. (What an amazing time we live in where we can debate excerpts from two speeches before they even happen.) Rubio looks like he will rest his middle class argument on having a “free economy”. This usually means an economy with less governmental regulation. Of course, it is competition and not a free economy that is good for consumers. The “free economy” supported by Rubio and the GOP (as well as the tea party) allows for large corporations to consolidate power and provide barriers to entry, including economies of scale, that prevent upward mobility for individuals and make it harder for competition to do its job in keeping prices down.

Rubio blames President Obama and government for businesses not giving raises and reducing benefits. It is amazing how Conservatives think. It is not the greed of the business owners that are to blame for this in their eyes. Forget the fact that Wall Street is doing amazingly well. Forget the fact that the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is the highest it has ever been in years. No, to the GOP the reason that these business owners are not sharing in their personal successes is because of taxes and required benefits. I guarantee you that many of these businesses, if they didn’t have their higher tax rates and if they didn’t have to cover health insurance, that the additional revenue gained would not be going into the pockets of the employees. That money would just go into the pockets of the employers.

If the GOP gets its way, no additional employees will be hired, no additional wages would be paid, and no additional benefits will be earned. Most employers are not altruistic. Most employers will not just give away their profits. Unless labor can force them to pay more money, the employers will keep as much as possible. But it has been the main goal of the GOP recently to take power away from labor. And that is why the GOP plans are bad for the economy because they are bad for the worker. They take power away from employees and give it to the employer. And when the employer has that upper hand, the employee gets stuck having to take whatever he/she can get.

Rubio wants growth in the economy. But growth wont happen until we stop making it profitable for US jobs to be shipped overseas. Growth wont happen if we sign free trade agreements with other countries that lack the employee protections that we currently have.

The Tea Party response from Rand Paul is also available online. Unfortunately it is full of straw man arguments and is really not worthy of comment at this time. I will wait until the full speech is given to see if he gets into details or if he is just full of hot air.